| Plenty of good ideas there. Are you aiming at the more serious photographer? You could ban iPhone pics! I think it's key to understand what people will pay for, and where the gaps are on competitor sites. You'll have more clue than me about all that. I used to pay for Flickr, but I lapsed and it felt like a shakedown to have to pay to be able to access my pictures. Left a bad taste. I understand the model, but between that and all of the Yahoo integration I got fed up with it. However I now use Imgur a lot and recently went 'Pro', though it is mainly for screenshots and image hosting, as opposed to decent quality photos. The key, in terms of marketing, is to either have a brilliant story or brilliant content (or both). If you have the former then the latter follows naturally. Your content is largely the photos, but I think you should take some ownership over content creation - a blog is a no brainer and could be crucial for your SEO and social efforts. There are plenty of things you can do on the user experience front, though you've made a great start on that score. The detail matters. For example, I'd use synonyms on the homepage for 'fantastic image', just to mix it up. The ranking algorithm is always a fun thing to work out, and experiment with. |
I think most people are actually pretty happy to pay for increased usage limits and the like, though I don't want that to be the only boon. I'm also trying to keep it to one subscription level, as I think the tiered plans on some other sites can make subscribers of the cheaper plans feel less important than those on the higher ones.
I definitely don't want to go down the Flickr route of blocking ex-subscribers from their photos. I'll likely just prevent new uploads in that case.
Imgur is great and I think there's scope for that ease-of-use in the more photographer-oriented market. My uploader at the moment is a bit basic, but I'm working on improving that.
A blog is definitely coming; I've been really lax in getting it set up. I'll definitely have one for launch. I also really need to do some SEO work, as I've done very little so far :D
In the past few days I've finally gotten to the point where I'm happy to do GUI work. It's weird; I have a degree in design, but I always feel like it's wasted time until I have all the important backend work done. I know that's not true, but it's why the design definitely needs some work right now. I'll be working on this quite a lot over the next few weeks!
The rankings gave me a great excuse to play with Redis sorted sets. At the moment it's very simplistic and I don't think it'll scale very well with lots of new users, so I'll be adjusting that. It's really enjoyable to fiddle with though :)